Discussion response

Hyperconnected

Nicholas A. Christakis and James R.Fowler

Every month, eleven million people around the globe play a game on the Internet known as World of Warcraft. It is a “massively multiplayer game” involving so many players that if it were its own country, it would be larger than Greece, Bulgaria, Sweden, and nearly 150 other nations. In this game, people adopt an online persona, known as an avatar, who inhabits a virtual world and interacts with other players in the game. This avatar has a vivid three-dimensional appearance that is customizable, and it acquires possessions, powers, and even pets over the course of play, which can last many months. Within this game, people form friendships, have sustained interactions as groups, engage in economic transactions, and fight one another in complex battles. The avatars live in different realms of the virtual world, and when they “die” during combat or other activities, they are automatically returned to their homes, whereupon they happily come back to life and resume play.Sometimes, however, things run amok. On September 13, 2005, the game developers opened up a new area for advanced players, one inhabited by a massive, powerful winged serpent called Hakkar. Hakkar was equipped with a number of weapons and capabilities, among which was a contagious disease called “corrupted blood” that he could spread to his enemies. When one of his adversaries was infected, other nearby opponents also became infected. To the strong players who had banded together to fight Hakkar, this infection was intended to be a minor hindrance that made combat more challenging. Once Hakkar was dead, players could leave the area and the contagion would stop.

The programmers at World of Warcraft thought this was a pretty neat trick to challenge their players. But the players responded to the contagion in an unanticipated way. Rather than continuing to fight against Hakkar until they died of corrupted blood, some players used a teleport capability to transport themselves to another area of the game. As a result, the infection spread widely throughout the entire virtual world, not just among the players confronting Hakkar. What was intended to be a minor inconvenience to powerful players in a localized area –something like a cold in a healthy adult living in a small town –instead inadvertently became a worldwide epidemic in the game, rapidly killing hundreds of thousands of weaker players.As players returned to their virtual homes, they spread the infection far and wide, including to the densely populated capital cities. In addition, through another programming glitch, the infection was permitted to spread to virtual pets. While the pets were immune and did not die, they served as reservoirs for the pathogen and became a source of immediate reinfection after their owners came back to life or were otherwise cured of the disease.The programmers scrambled to figure out what was happening as the pandemic raged. Initially, they had no idea why vast numbers of players were suddenly dying. They eventually imposed quarantine measures, isolating infected players from uninfected areas. But this often failed because players refused to be quarantined, and in any case it was not possible to restrict their movement to the extent required. Ultimately, the programmers resorted to a strategy thatdoctors and public health officials contending with a real global pandemic do not have: they pulled the plug on the whole world. After the epidemic of corrupted blood had raged unstopped for a week, they rebooted the servers, and the epidemic came to anabrupt and complete halt.

These curious events affected literally millions of players, but they also captured the imaginations of people in academia. Microbiologists, mathematicians, psychologists, and epidemiologists were fascinated by the epidemic unleased by Hakkar. Though the germ and victims in this outbreak were virtual, the behaviors of the avatars were entirely realistic –so much so that scholars have studied them as indicators of how people might respond in a bioterror attack or the recurrence of a real-world pandemic like influenza.Some characters in the game had healing powers, and they attempted (largely without success) to cure those afflicted with corrupted blood. They acted altruistically, often rushing to the center of the outbreaks totry to help, and they typically died as a result. Unfortunately, their selfless behavior actually worsened the epidemic in two ways: the healers often became vectors of the infection, and the patients they “cured” remained carriers and went on to infectmore people than they otherwise would have if they had simply died. Other characters in the game, lacking the altruism or sense of duty of the healers, fearfully fled infected areas to save themselves but wound up spreading the disease farther. Still others, driven by curiosity or thrill seeking, rushed to the outbreak sites to see what was going on or to see what an infection looked like (victims collapsed in pools of blood). Still others behaved in a sociopathic fashion, deliberately exposing themselves to infection and then quickly transporting themselves to the land of their enemies, or even to their own homeland, to spread the epidemic and cause as many deaths as possible.Amazingly, a detailed study of the corrupted blood outbreak was published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal usually devoted to covering the biology and treatment of real-world pathogens. The primary motivation for the study was to see if the virtual world could be used to model real-world behaviors during epidemics. The authors noted that if

future virtual epidemics were designed and presented so as to seamlessly integrate within an online game, a reasonable analogueto real-world reactions to epidemics might be studied and even manipulated.For thousands of years, social interactions were built solely on face-to-face communication. But technology changed this with the invention of ways of broadcasting information (church bells, signal fires, books, bull-horns, radio, television) and ways of communicating person-to-person at a distance (letters, telegrams, phone calls). Today, in addition to the impressive prospect of inhabiting virtual online worlds, we engage in other forms of communication and interaction that have already become common-place even though they are actually quite remarkable: we text, Twitter, e-mail, blog, instant-message, Google, YouTube, and Facebook one another using technology that did not exist a few years ago. Even so, there are some things that technology does not change.The inventionof each new method of communication has contributed to a debate stretching back centuries about how technology affects community. Pessimists have expressed the concern that new ways of communicating might weaken traditional ways of relating, leading people to turn away from a full range of in-person interactions with others that, in bygone eras, were necessary and normal parts of life. Optimists argue that such technologies merely augment, extend, and supplement the conventional ways people form connections.In the case of the Internet in particular, proponents argue that relationships that emerge online can be unfettered by geography and even, perhaps, by awkward constraints attributable to shyness or discrimination. Internet proponents have also seena benefit to the kind of anonymous and large-scale interactions that are much harder to arrange in the real world. Instead of having personal ties to a small number of people, we have more

tenuous ties to hundreds or thousands. Instead of simply knowingwho our friends are, and perhaps our friends’ friends, we can peer beyond our social horizons and even see graphical depictions of our place in a vast worldwide social network.Yet, new technologies –whether massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life; social network Web sites such as Facebook or Myspace; collective information sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, or eBay, or dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony –just realize our ancient propensity to connect to other humans, albeit with electrons flowing through cyberspace rather than conversation drifting through air. While the social networks formed online may be abstract, large, complex, and supermodern, they also reflect universal and fundamental human tendencies that emerged in our prehistoric past when we told stories to one another around campfires in the African savanna. Even astonishing advances in communication technology like the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet do not take us away from this past; they draw us closer to it.

Homework

In the case of the World of Warcraft epidemic, the designers solved an apparently unsolvable problem by rebooting the game. The authors note how the World of Warcraft players responded to the contagion in a range of ways, expected and surprising. Write a 17-19 sentence response comparing these responses with human behavior in the COVID crisis. In the World of Warcraft, the authors point out that starting over is not an option in the real world, but what if it were? If you could reboot the COVID crisis, how would you try to prevent it from happening again? You must respond to two other posts to receive credit for this discussion.